The Idol controversy explained: HBO’s The Weeknd-starrer sleazy new show glorifies abuse, trivialises mental health

A still from the HBO show 'The Idol'.

“Mental illness is sexy”, says Nikki Katz (Jane Adams), a record label executive as pop-star Jocelyn (played by sometimes sad, mostly edgy-looking Lily-Rose Depp) wears a hospital band for a revealing photoshoot. This sets the tone for what is about to follow in the six excruciating episodes of HBO’s The Idol.

Explained: The controversy around The Idol

The Idol is about a pop-star, Jocelyn, who has a mental breakdown causing her tour to be cancelled. She then befriends an exploitative cult leader. The Idol co-produced by Sam Levinson who is the brainchild behind the mega-successful HBO show Euphoria and its stunning visual montages. Levinson is known for using gratuitous amounts of nudity in his projects and has previously come under the scanner for promoting nepo babies. He also wrote a fictional character of a critic in his show Malcom and Marie to settle scores with a real-life white LA-based freelance film critic who gave his 2018 film Assassination Nation a bad review.

When he isn’t hounding critics, Levinson is busy creating a toxic work environment on set for the extras where he keeps them without food for hours, thus violating legal mandates around working conditions. He would often ask the female actors go topless even when it wasn’t required (as alleged by actress Sydney Sweeny), even asking them to go fully nude on their very first day of shoot (as alleged by Euphoria actress Chloe Cherry).

The Idol, too, was riddled with controversies. A damning Rolling Stone investigation revealed that director Amy Seimetz left the show before filming was completed, post which Levinson took over as the director. The Weeknd felt that the show focused too much on the “feminist perspective” and made some creative changes to it. One crew member said that the show “went from satire to the thing it was satirising.” When The Idol premiered on June 4, it was slammed for being inappropriate and sexist.

The creepy, sleazy gaze on Jocelyn’s body

A still from the HBO show 'The Idol'.

One would expect the showrunners to have an empathetic gaze towards Jocelyn since she has been exploited sexually and emotionally by those who were meant to protect her. The gaze, however, is anything but empathetic. It is nauseatingly creepy and sleazy. Exhibit A: The scene where Jocelyn performs her hit World Class Sinner with the dancers in her garden. The camera lingers on to Jocelyn’s body rather creepily, objectifying her to the point the viewer feels uncomfortable and complicit in her abuse. But that isn’t even the worst part about the show.

The Idol shows us Jocelyn’s journey through the lens of her abusers — the Vanity Fair interviewer Dyanne (Jennie Ruby Jane), her creative director Xander (played by a lost and frankly underwhelming Troye Sivan), her publicist Benjamin (Dan Levy) and manager Chaim (Hank Azaria). We also have Leila (Rachel Sennott), who is rightfully described as Jocelyn’s “brain dead” assistant. The scenes Jocelyn’s abusers gather and make conversation about profiting off her labour, are laughably bad — not in a Glass Onion-kinda way where one would laugh at the billionaires who are delusional and misinformed — but in “this is so badly acted, it is heartbreaking” way. But that is the least of The Idol’s problems.

Enabling Jocelyn’s abuse

A still from the HBO show 'The Idol'.

Most of what we know of Jocelyn is through her abusers. Not one person stands up for her when the intimacy coordinator is locked in a room during an exploitative photoshoot. Not one person on set alerts Jocelyn about her nude picture which is going viral on Twitter during the shoot. And then, when the camera lingers on her body creepily, one cannot help but wonder where the moral compass of the show lies. Is Sam Levinson making a show about a pop-star who reclaims her narrative and overcomes abuse? Or is he glorifying her abusers who are taking advantage of her vulnerability and deriving sexual pleasure out of it? This is why we need more women in writing rooms. The show celebrates Jocelyn’s abuse, glorifies it and just when you think it couldn’t get worse, it does.

The Weeknd’s laughably bad acting chops

A still from the HBO show 'The Idol'.

Enter Tedros played by The Weeknd (singer Abel Tesfaye) of the Blinding Lights fame. The Weeknd is supposed to play a menacing cult leader but he looks only as menacing as a mosquito. The scenes where Tedros gets intimate with Jocelyn are an unmitigated disaster, with some publications calling them the “worst sex scenes” that have ever been filmed. The chemistry between the pair is non-existent.

One can expect there’s an explanation behind this since Jocelyn briefly alludes to Tedros being gay. Still, The Weeknd is trying too hard to look like an intimidating cult leader but comes off as a teenage boy who just watched Andrew Tate’s videos and is now trying to act like an “alpha male”.

Where is the trigger warning?

A still from the HBO show 'The Idol'.

Besides The Weeknd's painfully embarrassing, cringe-inducing and school skit-level acting chops, The Idol has a serious problem. It is very likely to trigger survivors of abuse who have not yet healed from their trauma. In episode 2, we see Jocelyn have a mental breakdown and call her mom, who died after a battle with cancer. Jocelyn is in the middle of shooting a music video and has come back from the make-up trailer with cuts on her thighs, which allude to her declining mental health. Seeing Jocelyn vulnerable in an environment where every single person is enabling her abuse can be very distressing and trigger flashbacks for survivors.

Towards the end of the third episode, The Idol gets so nauseatingly abusive, creepy and disgusting that one cannot fathom watching the season in its entirety. When Jocelyn musters the courage to reveal that her mother was abusive to her as a child, Tedros retraumatizes Jocelyn by recreating her childhood trauma of being hit by a hairbrush. The scene is not only infuriating but so preposterous that one cannot help but wonder how HBO, the same production which gave us The White Lotus and The Last of Us, even greenlit this exploitative show.

Post the screening of first two episodes at the Cannes Film Festival (which surprisingly received a 5-minute standing ovation), HBO (in India on JioCinema) refused to send screeners for the right reasons. The Idol is a show that shouldn’t exist. It is offensive to any human being living or dead and is bound to leave not just survivors of abuse but even casual viewers disgusted.

No matter what turn the remaining three episodes take, it is hard to imagine that the showrunners can salvage the disaster that unfolded in the first 3 episodes, unless their damage control is Adipurush-level failproof. Still, HBO needs to reevaluate and at the very least, apologise for unleashing this dumpster fire of a show to the world.